I haven't watched it yet (besides a few clips I've seen here and there), but I'm reminded of how so many games in the 2010s got caught chasing graphical fidelity. That led to a surge in interest in indie games, many of which had objectively shitty graphics, but an art style that was deliberate and interesting. A recent game in that vein that I have played and loved is Signalis, an incredibly artistic survival horror game.
Gaming and animated movies are obviously two completely different mediums, but I reckon we can use the same lens here; I'm going to wait until I've seen this movie (or at least, substantial chunks of it) before I judge it. As you suggest, it being voted best animated movie suggests the story must be great, but what I'm really intrigued by is how well this particular animation style works to support its characters and story
Reasonably difficult, I think. I'm basing my answer off of the vibes I get from open source firmware projects for routers, which are far more common. I haven't heard of similar for printers, which suggests that there is less of a foundation to work on. I think Brother, in particular, was a brand that has typically been decent up until now.
I also get the sense that programming firmware is different enough to programming software that a software developer trying to contribute would find it really difficult(?. Someone correct me if I'm wrong — I'm not a software developer, but a scientist who writes code, so I'm speaking outside of my main expertise). But this loops back in with the lack of existing projects making it harder to get to grips with how to do stuff — part of why I like open source programs is because I can look through a project and try to understand what the code is doing.